Saturday, December 01, 2007

CODOH Lies and Ignorance: Himmler's Visit to Minsk

On October 22nd, 2007, the appropriately named 'Mr Nobody' started this CODOH thread, which gave a false account of how Holocaust websites have described Himmler's visit to Minsk. The thread was particularly significant because it exposed the shortcomings of three CODOH regulars: 'Mr Nobody', 'nathan' and 'Laurentz Dahl'. It also exposed the dishonest moderation of Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis, because Hargis never checked the idiocies being posted, nor did he ask the posters concerned to verify their sources. Here's how the lunacy unfolded.

Firstly, Mr Nobody claimed, falsely, that Holocaust websites derive all their information about Himmler's visit to Minsk from Bach-Zelewski's testimony to the Eichmann trial. Mr Nobody offered no evidence for this assertion, and did not quote from the websites concerned. His assertion can be refuted through a simple exercise. Mr Nobody claimed to have conducted a search on the words "Himmler Minsk", but when I did a search on those words, the third hit that came up was Richard Evans' submission to the Irving-Lipstadt trial, which contains two facts that immediately falsify Mr Nobody's claim. The first is that Bach-Zelewski gave evidence to the Wolff trial in 1964, in which he revealed that:

Himmler declared after the shootings that the hard struggle that the German people [Volk] had to undertake made harsh measures such as this imperative. The Jews were the bearers of world Bolshevism and they must therefore be destroyed. He and Hitler had assumed responsibility for this before the court of history. The task was difficult, but it had to be carried out.

Evans' second fact is that "Bach-Zelewski's account of Himmler's words was corroborated by no fewer than seven other witnesses at the [Wolff] trial," including the leader of EK 8, Otto Bradfisch.

Evans thus shows that there is plenty of testimony, from later than the Eichmann trial, which shows that the Minsk shootings were genocidal in intent. I would submit that Mr Nobody's search brought up this link but he dishonestly chose not to mention it.

Secondly, Mr Nobody made a great meal out of the fact that the content of Holocaust websites differs from the claims in Bach-Zelewski's diary. Mr Nobody concluded that the websites have therefore embellished the factual record. However, a review of these supposed "embellishments" shows that the websites have simply used other sources that are more authoritative than the diary. For example, Mr Nobody said:

1. the date is often given as the 15th August (2 days before Zelewski's Diary Entry).

A simple Google search would have told Mr Nobody that the 15th August is the date in Himmler's diary. There is simply no excuse for this willful stupidity and dishonest failure to check sources.

Thirdly, Hargis then intervened and made the moronic comment that:

it needs to be said the the 'partisans' (called 'terrorists' today), were subject to legal execution under international law.

Hargis ignored the fact that Himmler's diary entry referred to him witnessing an "execution of partisans and Jews" (Der Dienstkalendar Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, p.193), therefore the Jews killed were not partisans.

Fourthly, Laurentz Dahl then joined the idiots' chorus with an extract from a press report on the Wolff trial which stated that Wolff had denied any knowledge of the mass shootings of Jews and also that Wolff had claimed that:

he believed only partisans and saboteurs were shot.

Dahl would have seen that Wolff's defense was false had he read Evans' commentary on the trial (which was my third hit on Google as noted above), showing that eight witnesses, including Bach-Zelewski and Bradfisch, had all heard Himmler declare at Minsk that:

The Jews were the bearers of world Bolshevism and they must therefore be destroyed.

Fifthly, this moronic babble was then joined by 'nathan', who deliberately misquoted the evidence given by Christopher Browning to the Irving-Lipstadt trial:

[Bach-Zelewski's diary] was mentioned during the Irving trial by Professor Browning, who deemed it “doctored and sanitized” because it contains no evidence of genocide.

This was simply a lie. Browning never said "it contains no evidence of genocide". Browning simply claimed that Bach-Zelewski doctored the diary to remove evidence of his own guilt:

He did send apparently his doctored and sanitized diary to the Bundesarchiv all nicely typed up and all references to things that you have referred to, that he probably has many hundreds of thousands on his conscious [sic] nicely deleted.

In conclusion, therefore, we can see from this one thread alone how CODOH posters, as a group, have colluded in the distortion of evidence to make false claims about Holocaust websites and distinguished Holocaust historians. Jonnie Hargis has been the orchestrator-in-chief of this symphony of lies, but he has employed a full ensemble of monkeys and useful idiots to post distorted and mendacious claims on his behalf.